Agentless

One of the key differentiators that gives Ansible an edge against the competition is the fact that it is completely agentless. This means there are no daemons that need to be installed on remote machines, no firewall ports that need to be opened (besides traditional SSH), no monitoring that needs to be performed on remote machines, and no management that needs to be performed on the infrastructure fleet. In effect, this makes Ansible very self-sufficient.

Since Ansible can be implemented in a few different ways, the aim of this section is to highlight these options and help get us familiar with the architecture types that Ansible supports. Generally, the architecture of Ansible can be categorized into three distinct architecture types. These are described next.